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Topic: My first honey harvest. (Read 471 times)

About 10 days ago now, I inspected 5 hives and re-hived a sixth colony.

Man, I was busy that day. I took Dad to town to pick up four pigs, so that pretty well wrote off half the day. It's Saturday, I shouldn't be getting out of bed at 06 bloody 30! I had the trailer unpacked by 0730, then it was up to the old man's place to load a bin in the trailer to put the pigs in.

I did a short video of what's going on with the yard these days (hint: I'm picking raspberries!). Then I inspected my four bee hives.

At 1500, I managed to get up to the old man's place to check the hives that I've claimed. They'd been abandoned for about 4-5 years. The hive that I split off is a dead out, so next week I'll grab the gear from that and reclaim the wax. The hive that I split from is looking okay, although with a bit of chalk brood. I'm hoping they get over that. Anyway, they were looking fairly full, so I chucked a full-depth super on top of a queen excluder.

That left me with the hive that I had yet to open up, the one with the hive boxes rotting away around the bees. I re-hived them, complete with new bottom board and lid, as well as a few new(er) frames with foundation.

The lid was full of burr honey comb, so I cut that out and put it into plastic containers. I ended up giving away a fair bit of it, both at work and to family. I've packed some up for my kids for Christmas gifts.

I had about eight frames with a mix of brood and honey comb where the frames were knackered, so I brought them home.

I cut out the honey comb and, despite having an extractor, I mashed it up and filtered out the honey. I mashed up the brood comb with a paint mixer, rinsed it and ran it through the solar wax melter. It's in the second stage filtration now, so I haven't weighed it to see how much I ended up with.

Before I loaded up the solar wax melter, I cleaned out the most recent batch of filtered beeswax. I'll be making candles, either later tonight or tomorrow morning.